Oracle R12 Vision Instance 12.1.3 Cloning – step by step instructions

*General Note: The below instructions, which were successfully completed and tested are from the prospective of a person who do not have any previous knowledge about cloning, advance level Linux administration etc. If you find it too amateurish, please let us know with the comments session and corrections. We will be more than happy to amend the post.

Most probably few of the errors we received with write permissions missing to /tmp for applprod user should because of missing Rapid Clone patches.

Prerequisites

Oracle VirtualBox (We don’t support a physical system as detailing a cloning for a Linux system wouldn’t fit entirely within the discussed topic)

Minimum 4GB of memory to spare for the Virtual Machine

500GB of free hard disk space (If you don’t have additional 500GB, you can use the same source machine for cloning, by backing up the necessary folders and after removing the E-BIZ folder entirely)

Step #1

Create a folder on a partition where you have 500GB or more space and call it “ebiznew”

Copy and paste both System.vdi and ebs1211db.vdi from your other virtual machine folder, where you have a properly working Vision Instance (We are not going to clone the existing VM using the VirtualBox clone utility)

Make sure from your HOST box you can ping the new VM by both hostname and IP address

*Special note: If you have a total of 8GB(only) memory with your box, you have to change the memory allocations for both your VMs (one which already has the Vision instance configured & the new VM on which you are going to execute the cloning) to 2GB each

Boot up you VM with Vision instance configured and running (Aka source system)

Edit /etc/hosts file and add the IP address and hostname of your new VM

As root

vi /etc/hosts

192.168.0.50 ebs1213.rhome.com ebs1213

Where ebs1213 is the new hostname you have set for the new VM. Adjust it according to the name you have chosen

Save and exit the vi editor and try to ping the new VM from your source VM

ping ebs1213.rhome.com

Make sure you are getting ping replies from the new VM

Start dbTier and appsTier sequentially and make sure that you can access the application

Step #2

Now we are all set to “try” our first cloning process

Prior cloning we MUST prepare the source system for cloning. Hence switch user to “oracle” and switch to following folder (Adjust the path according to your environment)

cd /u01/E-BIZ/db/tech_st/11.2.0.2/appsutil/scripts/VIS_appvis

$perl adpreclone.pl dbTier

(provide the apps password when it is promoted)

The pre-clone should complete within few minutes time, and if there are no errors (in our case), we can proceed to prepare the application tier now

As user “Oracle” switch to

/u01/E-BIZ/inst/apps/VIS_appvis/admin/scripts

$perl adpreclone.pl appsTier

(provide the apps password when it is promoted)

Let the pre-clone procedure complete.

Once the pre-clone procedure has been completed, shutdown the application tier and database tier sequentially

Check for FNDLIBR processes, until the count reaches two(2)

$ps –ef | grep FNDLIBR | wc –l

Now we have to copy the database and application tier folders to our target VM. For our exercise we will create individual tar.gz files for both database and application folders

We will create a new folder with /u01 on the source system

As root

#cd /u01
#mkdir backup
#cd backup
# time tar -zcvf db.tar.gz /u01/E-BIZ/db/*
This will create a new tar ball with the name “db.tar.gz” inside /u01/backup folder
Sit back and relax, it is going to take some time
Once the tar process finishes, we will attempt to create a tar ball for the application tier
#time tar -zcvf apps.tar.gz /u01/E-BIZ/apps/apps_st/*
The entire tar processes may take more than couple of hours time (Depending upon the resources you have allocated for the source VM)

Amount of time required will vary depending upon the resources available. Wait until the transfer completes

Now you can shutdown your source system (So that you can release the memory/processors allocated and increase them with your new VM on which we will continue with the cloning process)

Shutdown your new VM (Target system)

Make changes to your new VM with more memory, processors etc

Boot up the new VM and logon to the VM as root

Step #3

We are going to MIMIC a production instance with our new VM (Please note, do not attempt to violate Oracle’s licensing agreements, our intention is not to help you with doing something which is against Oracle’s licensing terms and Vision instance usage)

We will create two new users and add them to existing oinstall and dba groups

As root

Now switch to /u01 folder (or other mount point as you have created it)

We will create a number of folders, which will be entirely different from the Vision Instance structure

I cannot say why this error happens. As I have asked you last time, go through the 2nd post explaining how to configure the forms and reports for OHS. I am sure you have missed something this time as well. Hope that helps :)